In many circumstances where medical treatment is appropriate, behavior-based treatments may be an alternative or additional approach to other types of medical treatments. Delivery of behavior-based treatments can involve guidance to the patient that accounts for the condition of the patient, the preferences of the patient, the responsiveness of the patient to particular treatment types, as well as the relevant circumstance in existence at the time a treatment is proposed.
One method of accounting for these variables when providing guidance to a patient has been to engage medical practitioners directly to provide oversight, diagnosis, instruction, and/or treatment. One problem with this approach is that it requires direct access to the medical practitioner at the time that treatment is required, which can be impractical and/or impossible at certain times. In addition, such access to practitioners, if available, can be quite costly, even for routine guidance.
In an effort to provide patients assistance in making treatment decisions without direct access to a medical practitioner, patient education programs have been developed. These programs have attempted to educate patients in advance of the need for treatment guidance. However, this approach has lacked a number of elements conducive to reliable and accurate treatment. First, when a patient is under the stress and challenges associated with the symptoms of a particular condition, it can be difficult for the patient or those with them at the time to remember the teachings delivered during the educational program, or to think clearly enough to apply the teachings correctly. Further, the number of variables used to deduce the proper treatment can be large, and the relational complexity among the variables can be significant. This approach relied on the patient to be able to account for and mentally consider the set of variables and apply whatever rule-based decision-making was necessary to determine the appropriate treatment, even when relational complexity was prohibitively complex.
An approach used in some situations has involved providing the patient with a document incorporating rules and pictures into a type of decision matrix that the patient could then use to try to ascertain the optimal behavior-based treatment for a given circumstance. In addition to the above drawbacks with the prior solutions, this approach has required that the patient have ready access to the document or documents, and that they be in a position to read the material. It is both inconvenient and impractical to expect people to carry with them a set of documents providing guidance for whatever condition they might face at any given time. Further, interacting with a complex set of rules by reading and navigating a book or pamphlet may not be possible in many of the traumatic situations that often exist at the time treatment is desired.
This static approach to diagnosis and treatment based on a pre-defined rule set has had the further drawback of making it difficult to update treatment programs based on unexpected conditions, newly-discovered relevancy of unaccounted-for variables, and/or changes in the medical field relating to the particular condition or treatment. The applicants believe they have discovered that the redistribution of materials and/or continuing education of patients is inconvenient and costly, as well as unreliable given that it requires action on the part of the patients to proactively obtain updates from the educator and/or practitioner, and also relies on action by the educator and/or medical practitioner to continually track patients and notify patients of updates.